Falaknuma Palace, Hyderabad

Because the Nizams were a ruling Moghul family in Hyderabad who had not fought in the first Indian War of Independence, they were given special privileges by the British. Thus although Hyderabad was just one of the princely states of British India, it was allowed to retain control of its internal affairs. This worked out well for the Nizams - they ruled their state as a inherited monarchy for 223 years (1724-1947), until Indian independence.

Falaknuma dining table - longest in the world?

As befitted a wealthy, cultivated royal family, the Nizams aspired to be important patrons of the arts. Their stunning and indecently expensive architecture, pearls, diamonds, furniture, art works, jade, carriages and cars came from various cultural traditions - often European, blended with Hindu and Islamic tastes. Of their ten palaces, one was more beautiful than the next.

Nawab Vikar-ul-Umra, the Prime Minister of Hyderabad, started building Falaknuma Palace in 1884, choosing to use an English architect. He completed the giant task within 9 years. Alas he couldn’t pay all the costs, so by 1898 the palace had to became the home of his nephew, the 6th Nizam Nawab Mahboob Ali Khan. His family used and loved the palace until after the end of WW2.

Falaknuma Palace was, since the beginning, filled with Italian marble, stained glass windows and Venetian chandeliers in its 220 rooms and 22 halls. When an important hotel chain started renovating and restoring the palace in 2000, they wanted to preserve the taste of the Nizams wherever possible in the new hotel. The rooms and halls were decorated, as of old, with ornate furniture, rich handcrafted tapestries and brocades. They retained 40 huge Venetian chandeliers and intricate frescos, paintings and statues.

Falaknuma Durbar Hall

The old palace opened as a hotel in November 2010. As the Taj Hotel’s history page reports,  the palace library is home to the rarest of manuscripts and books, selected and brought back by the Nizam himself. Its walnut carved roof was designed to imitate the one at Windsor Castle. A marbled staircase still takes guests to the upper floor, complete with balustrades, marble figurines holding candelabras and an historical picture gallery along the staircase walls.

Although spouse and I always stay in university digs or cheap bed-and-breakfasts when overseas, the new hotel has two significant rooms that I would like to cast my historian’s eyes over. Firstly the 101-seat dining hall, considered the largest in the world, where the Nizam ensured that his banqueting guests ate from solid gold plates. Secondly the Durbar Hall, complete with its carved wooden ceilings, long line of chandeliers and parquet flooring. The Durbar Hall, typically the ruler’s formal meeting space, once hosted royal guests like King George V and Czar Nicholas II.

The renovated palace hotel, 2010

Falaknuma Palace Hotel even has a resident historian, Mr Prabhakar Mahindrakar. The Style Saloniste blog tells of meeting and spending time with Mr Mahindrakar, examining the architectural and art treasures of the palace hotel. Her interior photos are worth a closer look.

Hyderabad, India

C19th ferneries, greenhouses & conservatories

It is said that by the late Georgian years, everyone in England was becoming excited about the science of exotic plants: collecting, studying and classifying specimens from all over the world. In time it was ferns that fascinated country home residents and gentlemen botanists.

Bicton Park palm house, 1820

The Palm House at Bicton Park in Devon is the earliest glass structure I could find. It dates back to the 1820s and was amazingly constructed using 18,000 panes of glass. 1st Baron Rolle must have been passionate about things horticultural because he also commissioned a hermitage garden, rose gardens, fernery and a pinetum for conifers.

The architect, John Loudon, was said to make the domical conservatory his signature shape. He wrote booklets on the construction of hot houses in 1805, 1817 and 1818, and greatly influenced Joseph Paxton who erected his great conservatory at Chatsworth at least 15 years after Bicton Park was completed.

The availability of cast iron and mass-produced glass to build large glass houses for growing tender and exotic plants could not have come at a better time. The loveliest part of Syon Park's gardens was the Great Conservatory. The 3rd Duke of Northumberland commissioned Charles Fowler to build a new conservatory in 1826, one of the first of its kind to be built out of metal and glass. It was originally designed to act as a show house for the Duke's exotic plants and, like Bicton Park, is said to have inspired Joseph Paxton in his designs for the Crystal Palace.

Syon Park conservatory, 1826-30

Surgeon and amateur naturalist Dr Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward soon realised that he needed to provide a special environment for growing these delicate plants, a micro-climate that was light, airy, warm, moist and pollution free. Not easily achieved, I'd imagine. But he soon popularised large structures for ferns that had glass panes in the sloping roof sections. These could be carried on ships returning from exotic locations, ensuring that collectors back home received their precious speciments in a thriving condition.

James Bateman and his wife Maria, who bought Biddulph Grange in Stoffordshire in 1840, had a passion for plants AND the money to make their botanical dreams come true. Of course it was not difficult when James' father made a fortune in coal mining... and left it all to James. Nonetheless Bateman had every single explorer and scientist who ever sailed to Egypt, China, North America and other lands bring back fabulous botanical samples. This Victorian plant-hunter became an expert botanist, especially re pines, orchids, dahlias, ferns, azaleas and rhododendrons.

In the late 1830s Joseph Paxton, 6th Duke of Devonshire’s estate manager, built a wonderful conservatory at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire (now destroyed). This was the largest glass building in the world, at the time.

Palm House, Kew, 1844-8

Temperate House, Kew, 1859-98

Besides educating visitors in the natural world, one of the functions of English green houses at the time was to display the exotic range of plants and flowers that flourished in the British Empire. Inspired by Chatsworth and by the passion for scientific knowledge, architect Decimus Burton and iron founder Richard Turner designed the much larger palm house in the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in 1844-48. Palm House was 363’ long, 100’ wide, 66’ high. For big, beautiful photos of Kew Gardens, inside and out of the glass houses, see Architecture of Europe blog.

At Kew Gardens, this summer holiday, they are filling the Palm House with the sounds of the rainforest with Chris Watson’s Whispering in the Leaves sound installation, recreating the rainforests of South and Central America. The education, and the pleasure, continue at Palm House, 160 years after it all started.

In 1859, the Government allocated a substantial budget to build the Temperate House at the Botanic Gardens and directed Decimus Burton to prepare designs for the conservatory. The Treasury was clearly having budgetary problems but the building was finally completed in 1898. Temperate House was the greenhouse that had twice the floor area of the Palm House and is the world's largest surviving Victorian glass structure. It still contains plants from all the world’s temperate regions.

Crystal Palace, interior, 1851

Joseph Paxton achieved great fame by his designs for Crystal Palace, which housed the Great Exhibition in 1851 in Hyde Park London. Crystal Palace was another stunning cast-iron and glass building. It may not have looked very different from previous greenhouses in shape, but it was gigantic compared to earlier structures. It was five times as long as the Palm House in Kew and nearly twice as high.

A very fine collection of gardens was assembled at Tatton Park near Tatton Hall in the beautiful Cheshire Peak District. The first formal gardens were already well established and consisted of a walled garden to the south of the house, a formal semicircular pond to its north and formal lines of trees to the east and west.

But by the 1850s, the Egerton family needed a top quality fernery built, specifically to house their collection of ferns, especially tree ferns, from New Zealand and Australia. Tatton’s fernery and Italian garden, which first appeared in 1859, were designed by the very same Joseph Paxton. And Paxton’s assistant in the Tatton project was his son-in-law, George Stokes. Once again Paxton designed Tatton’s fernery to be a structure of glass and cast iron.

Tatton Park fernery, 1859.

Today the glass houses, fernery and showhouse at Tatton Park are open to visitors. The fernery still contains tree ferns and the showhouse has changing displays of flowering plants. How wonderful that Paxton could find it exactly as he had left it, 150 years ago.

Ballywalter Park conservatory, mid 1860s

Ballywalter Park is located on the outskirts of Ballywalter in Ireland. It is a classic example of an early Victorian county house in the palazzo style. A fine conservatory was added to the garden in the mid 1860s, containing important collections of rhododendrons and roses. The architect Sir Charles Lanyon had considerable experience in designing conservatories - his 1840 palm house at Belfast botanic garden was one of the earliest examples of curvilinear iron & glass construction. The delicate glass dome at Ballywalter Park is both functional and beautiful to look at.

Royal Greenhouses of Laeken, exterior

The Royal Greenhouses of Laeken, in the park of the Royal Castle in Brussels, were and are a vast complex of monumental heated green houses. The complex was originally commissioned by Belgian King Leopold II, designed by Alphonse Balat and built towards the end of the 19th century (1874-95). The total floor surface of this immense complex is 2.5 hectares so it requires a substantial amount of heating. Unfortunately these greenhouses are not open to the public for most of the year.

Royal Greenhouses of Laeken, interior

**

Now to something quite different. The first time I saw the Palmenhaus in Vienna’s 1st District, I thought it was a Paxton building... with the shape of Crystal Palace and the role of a greenhouse. The site had been occupied by a greenhouse which was from the 1823-6 era, built according to the designs of architect Ludwig von Remy. The architecture was in neo-Classical style and was actually inspired less by Paxton and more by the orangery of Schönbrunn, the Imperial Summer Palace in Vienna.

Palmenhaus Vienna, exterior and interior

At the turn of the century (1900-1), the first Palmenhaus greenhouse was demolished and a new one built, 128 metres long and 2050 square metres in area. The current Palmenhaus was built by architect Friedrich Ohmann, combining 19th century historicist architecture and the Jugendstil/Art Nouveau taste. Palmenhaus still houses plants of course, but it is today it is better known as a restaurant.

William Morris and Tudor architecture in Adelaide: Carrick Hill

A few C19th South Australians became very rich, owning huge pastoral leases and later investing in very successful copper mines. Robert Barr Smith (1824–1915) was such a pastoralist. At least two Adelaide institutions were substantially funded by this Australian-based son of a Scottish minister: St Peter’s Anglican Cathedral and The University of Adelaide’s very grand Barr Smith Library.

But it was through their collecting that I first heard of the Barr Smith family. From the 1880s on, Robert and Joanna Barr Smith were major clients of William Morris' London shop, furnishing seven of their vast South Australian houses almost exclusively from the firm.

Small Barr carpet, William Morris 1890, now in Art Gallery of SA

hand knotted wool pile, 280 x 280 cm

Robert’s son, Tom Elder Barr-Smith (1863–1941), his wife and their five children used the stately home Wairoa in the Adelaide hills as their summer house for 30 years. During this period the Tom Barr-Smiths made a number of alterations to the house. But most importantly for us, they refurbished the interior of the house with William Morris wallpapers, curtains and rugs.

Today the Art Gallery of South Australia says it holds the most comprehensive collection of Morris & Co furnishings outside Britain; the first and finest of its purchases was a Morris & Co tapestry, The Adoration of the Magi, which arrived in 1917. Later the Gallery has brought together furnishings from the Barr Smiths’ richest rooms, including the large Drawing Room at Torrens Park. Embroideries have been conserved for display, including a large 1890s hanging, designed by May Morris, depicting fruiting trees, birds and foliage in silks. And many new items have been acquired directly from London, including the famous Trellis wallpaper, designed in 1864.

Later in his life, William Morris could publish books with the establishment of his Kelmscott Press in 1890s. Some of these beautiful books, catalogues and pamphlets have now been collected together by the State Library of South Australia.

Carrick Hill house and gardens

So I was looking forward to seeing Carrick Hill, the estate that grew out of the 1935 marriage of members of two of Adelaide's most prominent families: Ursula Barr Smith (1908-70), daughter of our very wealth pastoralists and Edward Bill Hayward (1903-83), son of the wealthy merchant family that owned John Martin's, once Adelaide's greatest department store.

Bill & Ursula honeymooned for a year in Britain. It was then they came across Beaudesert, a grand old Tudor manor house in Staffordshire , owned by the Marquis of Anglesea. As quickly as they could, the honeymooners acquired much of its Tudor and later panelling, doors, staircases and windows. The house was already being destroyed, and the fittings and fixtures would have ended up in the skip, had the young couple not rescued them and sent them in shipping containers to Australia.

When they returned to Australia, Ursula's father gave the couple the land on which Carrick Hill now stands as a wedding present. This was a very substantial gift - 40 hectares of prime real estate with fantastic views of the city. A family friend in Adelaide, architect James Irwin, designed a house for them around Beaudesert’s fittings.

I wonder if Adelaide society noted the inconsistencies in a moderately sized 1930s Australian house complete with Tudor fitted interiors, Arts and Crafts decorative elements and modernist paintings.

The ground floor is dominated by the large panelled hall. Australia's finest collection of antique oak furniture is to be found in the dining room downstairs, where the Haywards lived a British lifestyle. The Jacobean-style staircase is large, very grand and definitely the centre-piece of Carrick Hill. It leads from the grand entry hall to a very decent gallery above, a gallery covered with paintings.

Tudor panelled hall, staircase and art collection

The art in the gallery includes amazing paintings and sculpture. Many of the paintings preserve and celebrate Australia’s British heritage, as analysed in The British Collection at Carrick Hill, ranging from John Dicksee 1876 to Stanley Spencer 1945.  Since most Australians believed that it was possible to be both British & Australian, the Hayward collection should not be dismissed out of hand as Anglo-centric. In fact these paintings might specifically enable the modern viewer to critically examine the consequences of colonialism, of empire and of nation building.

Nonetheless it is inevitable that the couple would largely support the contemporary Australian artists they were closest to, especially Russell Drysdale, William Dobell, Donald Friend, Nora Heysen, Jeffrey Smart and Adrian Feint. In time William Dobell introduced them to Patrick White, and their creative circle grew.

Upstairs the bedrooms have an unusual mixture of Georgian furniture and Victorian oak pieces, mostly inherited from Ursula's family, and used to fit in as needed. But the bedrooms are also where daddy’s Arts and Crafts objects are most in evidence; in fact the bedrooms signal William Morris’ only appearance in this house. I wonder why did Bill and Ursula not want to fill their house with her parents’ Arts and Crafts treasures.

Carrick Hill was being built from 1937 on, and within two years the couple had moved in. 1939 was also the year in which Ursula started designing the rather splendid garden, trees, water features and external statues. It is worth repeating that these two wealthy and cultured Australians established a stylish British way of life; Ursula and Bill’s parties, music and wine must have seemed rather wonderful.

Dining room, set for 10 guests

Carrick Hill was just one of the Haywards' four homes. The one I would most loved to have seen was the townhouse in Mayfair, situated near many of their favourite London art and antique dealers.

The honours rolled in. In 1953 Ursula was appointed as trustree of the Art Gallery of South Australia. In 1961 Edward was knighted for his service to the community and to business. A decade later Sir Edward and Lady Ursula Hayward agreed to bequeath Carrick Hill to the people of the state.

Women's Institutes - "For Home and Country"

Women’s Institutes originated in Canada in 1897, as a direct result of the work done by a Mrs Adelaide Hoodless (1857-1910). Hoodless had been pushed into advocacy when her youngest son died in infancy after drinking impure milk. Along with farmers Erland and Janet Lee, Hoodless drafted the charter for the Women’s Institute movement and helped organise the first Institute at Squire’s Hall, in rural Stoney Creek, Ontario.

The 1897 meeting planned a path for the Federated Women’s Institutes across Canada. The women affiliated to the Farmer's Institute and actively pursued the support of the Minister of Agriculture. Government cooperation was important from the start of the organisation.

Erland and Janet Lee Museum, Hamilton, Canada.

In 1910 Mrs Hoodless made an appeal for a university faculty of Home Economics. Although she didn’t live long enough to see it, Hoodless had done the pioneer work for the founding of a Department of Household Science at Toronto University. She organised Household Science classes at the YWCA in Hamilton and persuaded the Province of Ontario to undertake a province-wide programme. She influenced Lord Strathcona to assist in financing the Ontario Normal School of Domestic Science and Arts in Hamilton in 1900. Mrs Hoodless convinced tobacco millionaire Sir William Macdonald to contribute financially to the establishment of Macdonald Institute, Guelph and to Macdonald College, Quebec.

In 1915 the Agricultural Organisation Society in Britain, under the Ministry of Agriculture, were looking to Canada to start a similar organisation in the heart of the British Empire. The object of the Agricultural Organisation Society was to organise farmers into co-operative societies for the purchase of agricultural requirements and for the sale of produce. So they invited a Mrs Madge Watt, who was visiting from Canada, to address them.

Clearly the British men saw the value of the Women’s Institute movement in war time, to get rural women working co-operatively and to increase food production. The first Institute in Great Britain was started that year in Llanfair PG in Wales. And the Scottish Women’s Rural Institutes soon became very popular as well.

From 1915 – 1917, the British Women’s Institutes adopted rules specifically based on the Canadian model and agreed that they would:
a) study home economics;
b) provide a centre for educational and social intercourse and for all local activities;
c) encourage home and local industries;
d) develop co-operative enterprises; and
e) stimulate interest in the agriculture industry.
From 1917-1919, under the Board of Agriculture, the same Women’s Institutes concentrated on food production to help the war effort.

Women's Institute meeting, 1920s

Two publications appeared in Britain. The Landswoman, shared with The Women's Land Army, appeared from 1917-1919. After 1919, a subscription magazine called Home and Country was published monthly.

How many women became members? The British membership is said to be 210,000 in any given year. Would that number have risen during the two world wars?

The idea of Women’s Institutes was first introduced to New Zealand by Miss Ann Spencer on her return from war work in England, where she had seen the organisation in action . In Feb 1921, in conjunction with Mrs Francis Hutchinson, Spencer formed the Rissington Women’s Institute in Hawkes Bay, and thence to the rest of the country. It is interesting to note that, whereas Institutes in other countries had received financial assistance from their Governments, the movement in New Zealand had been built up solely by the endeavours of the members themselves. A request in 1927 for government assistance was refused.

ANZAC Day Commemoration Committee noted that a number of women’s organisations in Australia became very active during WW1, including the Australian Women’s National League, Australian Red Cross, Country Women’s Association, Voluntary Aid Detachment, Australian Women’s Service Corps and the Women’s Peace Army. The trouble is, I can’t find any mention of a branch of the Country Women’s Association before the NSW branch was formed in 1922. It started at a Bushwomen's Conference held in conjunction with the Royal Agricultural Show in Sydney.

In its written history, this Australian branch tied itself back to the same Mrs Hoodless in Canada. But was there really any connection between Canadian, British, New Zealand and Australian country women? The CWA in Australia has generally been seen as a  conservative organisation. Yet while the CWA in many ways defended traditional gender roles, it has occasionally been a progressive force - eg consider its encouragement of rural women to take an active part in public affairs or in environmental issues. As early as 1936, for example, the NSW branch passed a resolution in favour of equal pay for women.

In general, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand all placed a strong emphasis on community service and personal growth for rural women. But I suppose each national federation of women’s institutes had its own priorities – one wanted a body that could support women in rural communities, a second might have wanted to build domestic science classes for female students and a third might have been mobilising women for war work. What they did NOT do was concentrate solely on baking fluffier scones or making more succulent orange marmalade.

The goals were specified in the 1920s when the British women agreed “to improve and develop conditions of rural life; to give to all country women the opportunity of working together through the Women's Institute organisation; to provide for the fuller education of countrywomen in citizenship, in public questions both national & international, in music, drama and other cultural subjects; and for instruction and training in all branches of agriculture, handicrafts, domestic science, health & social welfare”. Clearly the important and shared role in every country was to reduce rural isolation, give women an opportunity to develop confidence in their views and to participate in relevant health, welfare and educational projects.

The Women's Institute, a history of the British movement written by Susan Cohen

Simon Goodenough wrote Jam and Jerusalem: A Pictorial History of the Women's Institute, published by Collins in 1977.
Jane Robinson wrote A Force To Be Reckoned With: A History of the Women's Institute, published by Virago in 2011.
The Women's Institute by Susan Cohen came from Shire Publications in 2011.
"First Women's Institute Meeting 16th September 1915", in Britain At War 1915, Key Publishing, 2014.

Port Sunlight - a model village for Lever Brothers' workers

You may remember that The Great Western Railway built a small village to house its workers, 1.5 ks north of Swindon town. In the late 1840s and throughout the 1850s the Company built the families’ cottages, railway work shops, a good quality school for the children, accessible health care and dental care, a mechanics institute for adult education, a swimming pool and a library. By the 1860s New Swindon saw its first gas street lights installed and a fresh water supply was piped to the families’ cottages.

Did New Swindon become a role model for other employers looking to build villages for their workers? Looking At History blog suggests there were many models in the last half of the C19th, with a range of industrially paternalistic, humanitarian, philanthropic and Christian motives. And, the blog noted, it was in the industrial Midlands and north that the most significant contributions were made: Lever’s Port Sunlight in 1888, Cadbury’s Bournville in 1895 and Rowntree’s New Earswick in 1902.

Why would the Lever Brothers (and others) care about their workers? Clearly the growth of the factory system and the increase in population caused by the demand for labour, coupled with the influx of poor immigrants, had led to disgusting living conditions and disease. The sight of such wretchedness and poverty left an impression on William Lever (1851-1925) which influenced him in the future.

Port Sunlight houses facing The Dell

In 1887, Lever Brothers Co. began looking for a new site on which to expand its soap-making business, on which they could also build housing and services for their workers in the soap factory. They bought 56 acres of flat unused marshy land very close to Liverpool that looked uninviting, but was well located near a railway line.

The site became Port Sunlight, where William Lever built his industry and his model village. The name was derived from Lever Brothers most popular brand of cleaner, Sunlight. Lever personally supervised planning the village, and employed many architects, commencing in 1888. He wanted a healthy, happy and productive workforce.

By the time WW1 broke out, 800 houses had been built to house 3,500 people. As well as allotments, the garden village had communal buildings including a cottage hospital, schools, a concert hall, open air swimming pool, church and a temperance hotel. Lever introduced welfare schemes and provided for the education and entertainment of his workforce, especially in all the arts. Later the Lady Lever Art Gallery was established.

Lever claimed that Port Sunlight was an exercise in profit sharing, but rather than share profits directly, he would personally invest them in the village. He recommended that the workers leave their profits with him and he would provide everything that would make their lives pleasant. I wonder if he “recommended” that the money be handled this way, or he “insisted”. I also wonder if all decisions were made unilaterally by the employers or if a town council of workers and employers decided collectively.

I assume that community decision-making did eventually become democratic because Lever himself had originally established a temperance hotel in the village. Only later did the good citizens vote overwhelmingly to have a licence granted and a proper pub established.

The timing was perfect for Lever to adopt the architectural and landscape values of a Garden Suburb. Although the garden city movement approach to urban planning was not formally founded until 1898 by Sir Ebenezer Howard,  Ruskin, Morris, writers, artists, architects, designers and craftsmen were already dreaming of a picturesque, green Arts and Crafts utopia when the village was started. So each house in Port Sunlight was individually designed, complete with half-timbering, carved woodwork and masonry, ornamental plaster work and moulded chimneys.

The Lyceum, originally a school

Other communal buildings of importance included the Lyceum (which had been a school), the Gladstone Theatre and Hesketh Hall. The village contains a church and opposite is a small primary school. Port Sunlight’s open air swimming pool, now a garden centre and café, was the recreational centre of the village.

Lever was created a baronet in 1911 and raised to the peerage as Baron Leverhulme in 1917.

But for a small town, the most amazing facility was the Lady Lever Art Gallery which didn’t arrive until after WW1 (1922). A dedicated art collector, Lever was very proud of his treasures. This art gallery reflected Lever's personal collecting principles, and is particularly strong in Pre-Raphaelite art - Rossetti, Millais, Burne-Jones and Holman Hunt. I am assuming that Lever was displaying the taste typical of high Victorian industrialists, especially his gorgeous Alma Tadema, Watts and Leighton paintings.

What I could not have predicted was that Napoleon Bonaparte was Lever's political hero and that a special part of the Lady Lever art gallery would be dedicated to Napoleonia - busts, portraits, furniture, books and paintings.

So was the town a socialist utopia for workers? The design of Port Sunlight certainly expressed the utopian ideal espoused by theorists – equality through labour, and top quality housing and communal facilities available to all. It worked! The workers must have been delighted with the lifestyle their families could enjoy. But the village’s development was based on wealth generation by a large, privately owned company, not by the workers themselves.

Still, one has to assume that the workers loved William Lever. When Lord Leverhulme died aged 74 in 1925, his funeral was attended by 30,000 people.

Port Sunlight contains 900 Grade II listed buildings, and was declared a Conservation Area in 1978. At that stage, all residents were still employees of Unilever and their families. However in the 1980s the houses were sold off.

Lady Lever Gallery.

Arts and Crafts Tours recommend visits to the planned communities of Port Sunlight, Saltaire, New Earswick, Bournville, Letchworth Garden Suburb and Hampstead Garden Suburb. As well as understanding how late 19th century workers lived in attractive and well equipped villages, modern visitors can visit the homes of many of the Victorian patrons, the churches they built, and the art galleries and museums which now house their collections.

See two books. Edward Beeson's Port Sunlight; Model Village of England, a Collection of Photographs (New York, 1911) concentrates on town planning. Edward Hubbard and Michael Shippobottom's A Guide to Port Sunlight Village (Liverpool UP, 2005) considers the village in its historical context, with particular emphasis on the architectural aspects.

It will be interesting to see how much Bournville Village in Birmingham, built for Cadburys' workers, was based on the Port Sunlight village. Both projects commenced in the late 1880s.

Leo and Gertrude Stein, salonieres or collectors?

When Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was 3, the family moved to Vienna and Paris, so Gertrude spoke German, French and English from childhood. Her father then moved the family back to the USA in 1879 but died suddenly in 1891, so older brother Michael had to sustain the whole family.

Another brother, Leo Stein, moved back to Europe, painting and immersing himself in art in Florence. In 1903 Gertrude also moved back to Europe. She eventually ended up in Paris, with Leo, at a painting studio at 27 Rue de Fleurus on the left bank. Their large independent income, which Michael and his wife Sarah sent each month, made a bohemian life-style in Paris easy to sustain.

How did the Leo and Gertrude Stein become so knowledgeable about art? Art scholar Bernard Berenson introduced Leo to Paul Cézanne and helped Leo buy an early work from Ambroise Vollard's gallery. In 1904 Berenson took both Steins under his wing in Florence.

I have lectured many times on the Steins as cultural salonieres, but the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is now suggesting that the family was more important as art collectors. I may change my mind, but I doubt it.

Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905, San Francisco Museum of Art

In 1905 Leo and Gertrude saw the Manet Retrospective in Paris and bought Portrait of a Woman with a Hat by Henri Matisse. This purchase encouraged Matisse at a crucial point in his art development. It was at a time when he and other avant-garde artists were being criticised by the press. Soon the Steins were visiting the Matisses socially.

In 1905 Pablo Picasso met the Steins at Clovis Sagot’s; he'd turned a pharmacy into an informal art gallery. Soon after, the first Picasso oil paintings that Leo bought was Nude on a Red Background, a rose-period nude. Then the Steins bought some works of Renoir, 2 Gauguins, a Daumier, a Delacroix, an El Greco and some Cézanne water colours.

The friendship with the Matisses cooled only when Gertrude developed a much greater interest in Picasso. But all was well since it was actually Michael and Sarah Stein who continued to collect Matisses in particular.

Etta and Claribel Cone were wealthy, elegant, educated Baltimore women. Etta inherited her wealth at 27, giving her a handsome yearly income. The Steins and Cones travelled to Florence in1905 where Bernard Berenson introduced the Cones to art by Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck and Friesz. The Steins took Etta to meet Picasso at his studio while he was doing Gertrude's portrait, and persuaded Etta to buy Picasso drawings whenever that artist was short of funds.

Back left: Leo and Gertrude Stein, back right = Sarah and Michael Stein, 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, c1905.

The Steins were introducing artist to artist, patron to artist, patron to patron. In 1905/6, Leo and Gertrude invited Picasso and Matisse to their studio to meet each for the first time. In Jan 1906, Michael and Sarah Stein took Etta and Claribel to meet Matisse at his apartment over the Seine, and both sisters bought as many paintings and drawings as they could afford. Gertrude also sold the Cones a number of her prized pictures including Delacroix, Cézanne and a group portrait by Marie Laurencin that showed several of the regulars of the Stein salon, including Picasso.

Baltimore ultimately benefitted from the Cones' collecting.

27 Rue de Fleurus became the first real and permanent home for the Steins, and one that Gertrude remained in for 40 years. This is where the Steins provided the informal focal point for contemporary art in Paris. They inspired, supported and, most importantly for the modernists, they bought art. Their home became known as a salon, with paintings covering all the wall space in their home. Works by Picasso, Renoir, Gauguin, Cezanne and others overflowed into every room of the household. Artists, writers and critics became frequent callers, for the Saturday night art parties.

Michael and Sarah Stein also held open house on Saturday nights, near the younger Steins, and the participants could move easily fromone home to the other. These evenings enabled the young, impoverished artists to examine the family’s notable collections of paintings by good artists. Their salons functioned as galleries.

Picasso, Nude on a Red Background, 1906, Musée de l'Orangerie Paris

By 1909, photographer/gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz was introduced to the Steins. By this time Stieglitz was well acquainted with the works of Matisse, Picasso, and Cezanne, and began to actively negotiate with Leo and Gertrude to exhibit their massive art collection in his gallery. Other young modernist painters eg Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Marie Laurençin, Robert Delaunay, as well as Guillaume Apollinaire, frequented their salon.

Gertrude understood the radical implications of Cubism and was prepared to associate her reputation with it. Spanish cubist Juan Gris frequently visited in the 1910s, finding Stein accepting of the more radical art styles that other people tended to reject out of hand.

For the newly arrived young Jewish artists from Eastern Europe, starving in their Paris garrets, the Steins’ salons filled with food and drink were also much appreciated. The Steins and Cones might have all been secularist Jews, but they went out of their way to help young Jewish artists arriving weekly from Eastern Europe, especially Max Weber, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, Chaim Soutine, Sonia Delauney and Italian Amedeo Modigliani.

The fact that all the Steins, the Cone sisters, Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Alice B Toklas all spoke Yiddish or German as their mother tongue must have helped the young Eastern Europeans integrate, during their first difficult years in Paris. And, let me repeat, the endless supply of food and wine!

Alice B Toklas decided to sail from the USA to Europe and while in Paris, she was invited to a Saturday night party at #27. Toklas was soon besotted. She soon became a regular visitor and began going to the galleries and theatre with Gertrude. In 1910 Alice moved into the rue de Fleurus household and became Gertrude's right hand woman, secretary, reader and critic.

But several years after Alice arrived, there was a family rupture. Leo was a dedicated Matisse patron, not a fan of Cubism. Gertrude and Alice visited Pablo Picasso at his studio where he was at work on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Les Demoiselles was the work that marked the beginning of the end of Leo's support for Picasso. In 1912, Gertrude and Alice took all the Picassos, Leo the Renoirs and many of the Cézannes. Leo moved to Italy, permanently!

Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas in their art salon, rue de Fleurus.

The Steins had established the first “museum” of modern art. But the salon wound down with war breaking out in 1914, when Gertrude and Alice moved to Spain. However Gertrude still befriended people like writer Ernest Hemingway and designer Jean Cocteau. And Gertrude was still in close contact with Claribel Cone who happened to be in Munich when WWI broke out.

On her return to Baltimore in 1921, Claribel rented a large apartment in the same building as Etta’s and arranged it as a private museum for their growing collection. The excellent Cone collection of art eventually entered the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Claribel Cone died in 1929, Leo Stein died in 1947, Gertrude Stein died in 1946 and Alice B Toklas in 1967. Gertrude and Alice B Toklas were both buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

The recent San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's exhibition brought together important and difficult-to-assemble paintings that haven’t been together since pre-WW1 Paris. The Stein collection had been divided and subdivided constantly among relative, friends, dealers and collectors. Gertrude and Leo traded back pictures to acquire new ones, a practice that made it difficult to track down their possessions. American collectors John Quinn and Albert Barnes both had access to the Stein salon and acquired significant paintings from them. In 1913, Gertrude traded large early Picassos to dealer Kahnweiler in exchange for other paintings she wanted. Thus I am convinced the Steins were hugely successful as salonieres and patrons, but in the long term less successful as collectors of art.

I hope people fascinated with the Paris salon saw The Steins Collect Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde exhibition at the San Francisco MoMA, May - September 2011. Second best would be getting hold of the catalogue.

Rev. Thomas Oliver - Canadian inventor, USA businessman

The Oliver typewriter was invented in the 1890s by a Canadian minister from Ontario, the Rev Thomas Oliver (1852-1909). The minister wrote at least one sermon a week, plus speeches at weddings, funerals and baptisms. He needed to stand in the pulpit and read clearly to his awaiting congregation, not stumble over illegible hand writing. So like every doctor and cleric before him, this reverend gentleman had to deal with his legibility problem.

Oliver type writer, 1895 production type

In 1888, Oliver began to develop his first typing machine made from strips of tin. After years of development, he had developed a prototype model, composed of 500 parts. I don’t know why the good businessmen of Ontario didn’t invest in the machine. But if Rev Oliver was going to realise his dream, he felt he had to move to Epworth Iowa, continue his work with the Methodist church and look for investors.

He married Mary Ann Eddy, a Canadian, and had two children, but I cannot find what happened to her.  The second wife was also a Canadian who moved withRev Oliver after he decided he would be more successful south of the border. The children of the second marriage were born in the USA where he resigned his ministry and threw himself full time into inventing.

Conventional typewriters then had the type arms laying on a bed in a well in the bottom of the machine. When the key was struck, the arm rose up in an arc and hit the page on the platen above it, before falling back into place. Why not, Oliver proposed, mount the arms in twin towers, above the platen, on either side of the typewriter. Thus his arms would utilise gravity by falling from the towers when struck, down on the platen.

I don’t know if he specifically wanted the user to see what he/she was typing – perhaps it was just serendipitous. But having the type-bars swing down to the platen from the two type-bar towers allowed for "visible typing". In addition, Oliver mounted the type face in the middle, creating a sturdier machine.

1904 advertisement for Oliver Typewriter (called the visible writer)

The Oliver Typewriter Co. was incorporated in 1895 and immediately begun operating in the USA, with its tiny administrative headquarters in Chicago. Then in 1907 the company took the first five floors of the Oliver Building which was build in North Dearborn Street, Chicago.

Soon the manufacturing sector of the business moved from Iowa to a factory in Woodstock, Illinois on a 12 acre lot next to the Union Pacific railroad. This was the real home of The Oliver Typewriter Company. Employee recreational activities included a company band and baseball team. Oliver built a bandstand for the Oliver Typewriter Band in Woodstock's Square in 1908.

Not only was the design clever, but so was the method of sales - the company established sales networks by encouraging customers to become local distributors. Although I have seen paid advertisments in newspapers and magazines, it seemed that world of mouth advertising was cheaper and more effective.

Thomas Oliver died in 1909 so he didn't see his company's sales go gangbusters. When the company was at its peak, some 400 typewriters were produced daily and sold. The Oliver Typewriter Co. employed 875 workers in the Woodstock factory alone, and there were branch offices across the USA including Baltimore,  New York, San Francisco and Seattle. Only when they changed sales tactics to a mail-order scheme in 1917 were the branch offices closed.

Competition and a recession in 1921-1922 caused many customers to default on their payments. In 1926 the board decided to liquidate, so the American plant closed and the company moved to the UK, becoming the British Oliver Company.

The Rev Thomas Oliver (1852-1909)

Sometimes I find information in amazing sources eg the Canadian Boer War Museum. The Oliver Typewriter had a slow start in the early 1890s but became popular just as the Boer War was reaching its worst era in 1900-1901. During the war this would have been the typewriter used to send messages or to type up news stories. The Canadian Boer War Museum was keen to add the machine to its collections, in order to preserve important Canadian heritage memorabilia.

German Expressionist art - fakes!

An art copier has admitted in court in Cologne that he faked 14 modern paintings that sold for millions of euros (see The Age 29/9/11). Together with 33 other suspected forgeries not included in this indictment, the case is believed to be biggest art deception in Europe in living memory.  A total of three other people are accused of fraud in the same case, but those three are still awaiting their day in court.

Did anyone in the art world suspect that the 14 paintings were fakes? In the early 1990s the canvases were presented for sale to a German auction house. The first warning that something may have been amiss came in 2008, when a George Grosz expert questioned the authenticity of the Gallery Fechtheim labels on the picture-backs. Two years later, word of possible forgeries leaked and the Berlin state criminal police started an investigation. Only now, in 2011, has 60 year old Wolfgang Beltracchi become the first of the four people accused of fraud to admit to the charges.

Campendonk, Man Horse Cow, c1918, 

64 x 77 cm, 

private collection. Legitimate

Cost so far: €16 million in forgeries, making total damages of €27 million. The list of fakes included works apparently by Max Pechstein, Heinrich Campendonk, Max Ernst, André Derain, Kees van Dongen and Fernand Léger. If I was designing a course for students on Expressionist artists, I could not have selected a better group of artists myself.

Rich investors were tricked into buying what were claimed to be long-lost paintings by these German and Dutch artists of the early 20th century. According to the story given to the auction house, the paintings had belonged to a rather secretive collector, Werner Jaegers. Werner who?

Jaegers had been a client of Alfred Flechtheim (1878-1937), the famous Jewish gallery owner whose business really WAS seized by the Nazis. Jaegers' granddaughters said he had bought this degenerate art from Flechtheim and had to hide it in the mountains near Cologne. Jaegers, according to the granddaughters' story, feared Nazi art-confiscators might discover his stash and take the offending pictures away. This was the reason, the women said, why the paintings were totally unknown by the modern art world.

Wolfgang Beltracchi, who had once been a student in an art school, had learned to copy art from his father, an art restorer who did replicas of the Old Masters. Beltracchi said he began copying on a professional basis in the 1970s, not because he liked the art market, the greedy dealers or the greedy buyers, but because he loved doing the paintings.

Why did Beltracchi choose to copy lesser known WW1 era expressionists and not, for example, Cezanne or van Gogh where he could have made more money per fake? I am assuming because a mother lode of previously unknown Cezannes & van Goghs would have provoked amazement in the art world, and therefore close scrutiny. Expressionist works were less well known, more scarce and their prices were rising at a slow but acceptable pace. All that was missing was an adequate supply of new works, which Beltracchi and his team provided.

Campendonk, Landscape with Horses, 1915. 

Faked by Beltracchi

Judge Wilhelm Kremer said it was amazing that art collectors had not noticed the deception about the supposed collector, Werner Jaegers, who was in reality the grandfather of Wolfgang Beltracchi's wife and co-defendant. “Jaegers was supposed to have collected Rhineland expressionist artists from the age of 16 or 17”, said Judge Kremer incredulously. As it turned out Jaegers, who died decades ago, did not collect art at all.

My feeling is that Judge Kremer was overly optimistic. I probably know a little bit more about the pre and post-WW1 German Expressionists than the average person on the street, yet there is no way I would have picked up their fake status via inspection. Furthermore I most certainly would not have checked the provenance of a painting, IF the auction was being run by a reputable firm.

And examining the estimated prices for bargains that were too-good-to-be-true would not have been helpful either. In the biggest fake sale, Red Picture with Horses, supposedly painted by Heinrich Campendonk (1888-1957), sold at auction in Cologne for $A3.4 million. It was the highest price ever paid for work believed to be by the Rhineland expressionist - not a bargain at all!

According to German news magazine Der Spiegel, a famous American film star bought one of the forgeries in 2004, believing it to be a 1915 work called Landscape with Horses by Campendonk. If the film star’s expert art advisors didn’t pick the fake, there is no way that an ordinary art lover could have known.

In thinking in particular about Heinrich Campendonk, I would have been personally quite pleased to “rescue” one of his works. A German artist, he had been a member of the famous Der Blaue Reiter group in the years just before WW1 erupted in 1914. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, he was among the many modernists labelled as degenerate artists, his paintings were removed from German galleries and his career prospects were slim. He emigrated to the Netherlands where he spent the rest of his life working at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.

van Dongen, La parisienne de Montmartre, 1911,  
65x 54cm, 
Le Havre, Musée des Beaux-arts André Malraux. Legitimate 

I would have liked a Kees Van Dongen (1877-1968) as well. This Dutch artist began to exhibit in Paris, and participated in the controversial 1905 exhibition Salon d'Automne, along with the other artists who created the bright colours beloved by the Fauves. He was also a member of the German Expressionist group Die Brücke for a time. van Dongen's portraits of well dressed women with beautiful hats and jewellery were a delight.

van Dongen, Portrait of Woman in a Hat. 

Faked by Beltracchi

Like artnet, I would want to know how an art fraud of such magnitude could be so successful? How did all the control mechanisms in the art market fail so comprehensively? Clearly the supporting documentation was of no assistance since the collection’s authenticity was "confirmed" by fake documents and fake photographs.

Castlemaine: 1850s and 1860s glory

Located 120km from Melbourne, Castlemaine was one of many settlements established as a fine area to farm. In 1851 a group of shepherds found gold at Specimen Gully, and in Sept 1851 a letter was published in the Argus newspaper announcing the discovery. The gold rush, once focused on Ballarat, soon descended on the nearby Castlemaine area.

Buda, home to the Leviny family, 1861-1981

The arrival at London’s port of six ships carrying tonnes of Victorian gold in April 1852 excited Britain. Instead of convicts being forcibly sent, all the new arrivals were now very keen volunteer settlers. A camp was set up and the area north of the camp was surveyed in 1852; Castlemaine was officially born. At this time, 25,000 people were living in tents on the goldfields; fortunately the area turned out to be one of the richest alluvial goldfields in the world.

In early 1854 the gold commissioner ordered diggers to evacuate the shanty town and to start building a proper town. Many significant buildings that are still standing today were erected as a result of that 1854 order - 5 churches, several hotels, solid shops and residences quickly went up. A red-brick court building built then, and located in the current Goldsmiths Crescent, is Victoria’s oldest remaining goldfields building.

The 1850s was a very busy decade. By 1860 the town supported six banks, two newspapers and 30,000 people. The first Castlemaine brewery, home of Castlemaine XXXX, was opened in 1857 by two locals, the Fitzgerald brothers. 

The Old Castlemaine Gaol was based on the radical concept of institutional design associated with the Pentonville Model Prison of 1842. Built during the late 1850s, it opened as a penitentiary in 1861 and continued operating as a prison & reformatory until it was finally closed in 1994. During that period, 10 inmates were hanged there and were buried in one of the gaol's outdoor courtyards. The sandstone gaol is one of nine built in Victoria during the mid-1800s, all essentially based on the same radical concept. Of those nine, the massive Castlemaine Gaol was the earliest to be commenced and completed. Its high red brick wall and circular watchtowers are still horrible to look at.

Second court house, built 1858

In 1858 the present courthouse was built, a rather lovely building designed by prominent colonial architect, Henry Ginn. A classical porch was added, as Castlemaine became a more elegant town.

The Botanical Gardens were reserved in 1860, laid out by Baron Von Mueller, who designed many of Victoria's public and private gardens. They are now amongst the state’s oldest and feature the English Oak planted by the Duke of Edinburgh during his 1867 visit.

The Castlemaine Market 1861 was originally part of a larger market complex designed by William Downe, town surveyor. Centrally located in Market Square, it reflected the influence of Christopher Wren and was built of stone and brick with cement rendering. Its Classical Revival structure was a symmetrical design centring on a large and elegant portico, capped by a pediment which incorporated a rising sun motif. On the roof line a statue of Ceres, Roman goddess of agriculture/fruitfulness, was placed.

Market hall, pillared pavilions, 1861-2

The halls, restored by the National Trust, once housed 22 stalls which vendors accessed through side doors. Market hall's light, spacious interior was based upon a Roman basilica with a clerestory roof featuring unique curved wood trusses. So the space was an excellent venue for celebratory balls: in 1862 for the opening of the railway and in 1867 for the Duke of Edinburgh's visit. The Old Market is now a historical museum.

Unlike Ballarat's and Bendigo's goldfields, the Castlemaine district didn’t have deep reefs of quartz gold. With the exhaustion of the alluvial gold, mining slowed and was replaced by other industries. Fortunately the slate quarry (1859), flour mills, railway foundry and brewery all provided employment. The state’s first large-scale woollen mills opened in 1868, Thompson’s iron and brass foundry in 1875, and Castlemaine Bacon Co. in 1905. Thus Castlemaine, once exclusively a gold town, survived the end of the gold rush.

The elegant Theatre Royal was first built in 1855, the place for Lola Montez to perform her famous Spider Dance in 1856. The original theatre was burned in 1857 but immediately replaced by a stone and brick building with a substantial iron roof, and has been operating ever since. The Theatre Royal and the Royal Hotel were eventually joined by a shared lobby. When the Royal Hotel wanted to go out of business, the Theatre was rebuilt, utilising the whole block. With the coming of moving pictures, the next owners moved with the times and the venue became the deco People's Popular Picture Palace. It was extensively re-modelled in 1938 having lost its High Victorian veranda, dress circle, fixtures and fittings in the early 1920s.

By the early 1970s the Theatre had fallen on hard times. It had a crumbling art deco façade and showed only one performance a week. Then it was renovated and modernised. Amazingly Castlemaine’s Theatre Royal has a history of over 150 years of continuous entertainment in substantially the same building, renovated as needed. It is thus the oldest continually operating theatre on the Australian mainland.

Delhi Villa was built in 1861 by the Baptist missionary Rev James Smith; he had chosen the site for retirement, after the sweatiness of  his mission service in India. When Delhi Villa became the home of noted Hungarian silversmith Ernest Leviny and his new bride in Dec 1864, they changed the name to Buda.  Ernest and Bertha soon had 10 children! Included in the Buda collection today are beautiful silver work and jewellery designs by Leviny. I also saw artworks including embroidery, metal craft, photography and wood work by the five unmarried daughters who resided in the house most of their lives. The 2 generations of the Leviny family occupied Buda for a period of 118 years (1863-1981).

Leviny was president of the Mt Alexander Castlemaine Horticultural & Agricultural Society in 1863. He invited Baron Ferdinand von Muller to be a guest at Buda, whenever the great garden designer was visiting from Melbourne (to work on the Castlemaine Botanic Gardens). Today visitors can walk through the Buda garden to understand the aspirations of those keen Victorian gardeners.

When the postal service was transferred from the gold commissioner's camp in 1859, a wooden post office was built to serve Castlemaine. But in time, a new, more gorgeous building was required. The new post office 1873-5 replaced the old one on the same spot, but the second version was designed as a decorative Classical Revival Italian palazzo, with a splendid central clock tower, arched bays and beaded colours on grey. Knowing the town’s glory days were already fading, why did the good burghers of Castlemaine want or need such an expensive building?

Present post office and tower, opened in 1875

Adjacent to the courthouse is the former School of Mines 1889 and, on the Frederick St corner, was the large red-brick town hall 1898. The façade of this very late Victorian town hall looks better, I think, than it used to. The red bricks have disappeared under stucco, highlighted with white paint.

Founded in 1913, Castlemaine Art Gallery & Historical Museum has an excellent collection of Australian art and of local historical items. The 1931 art deco building, which has been extended a number of times, is noted for its elegant design and is now Heritage listed. The gallery specialises in Australian paintings and art objects, featuring the Heidelberg School especially Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts. Collectively the three Victorian art galleries in Ballarat, Bendigo and Castlemaine hold some of Australia's key 19th century art pieces.

Record goldfields populations could not persist. The population for the municipality was 25,000 (in 1851), 30,000 (1861), 7,000 (1871), 5,000 (1891), 7,200 (1961) and 6,900 (1991). Officially proclaimed a city in 1965, gorgeous Castlemaine is now home to only 7,600 people. But it retained its gorgeousness almost by accident. When the alluvial gold dwindled and the town ceased to grow, the older buildings were deemed adequate for a small town. So many of the mid 19th century structures were never pulled down. These include the Library, Court House, Theatre Royal, the old gaol and the Market Building.

Town hall, built in 1898

Compare the Victorian architecture in this town with that in other large gold rush cities and small towns:  Ballarat, Beechworth, Maryborough and Daylesford. And examine the rise of court house architecture in Victorian gold towns. I will be coming back to Bendigo's special architecture in the near future.